Recommends a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams.

Transcript context

…I feel like documentary filmmakers usually do a much better job and the best job is usually done by biographers. So the more time you give to a particular conversation, really deep thought and historical context and studying the people, how they think, looking at all different perspectives, looking at the psychology of the person, the upbringing, their parents, their grandparents, all of this. The more time you spend with that, the better the quality of the conversation is because you get to really empathize with the person, with the people he or she represents, and you get to see the common humanity, all of this. Interviewers often don’t do that work. So the best stuff I’ve seen is interviews that are part of a documentary. But even now, documentaries are like there’s a huge incentive to do as quickly as possible. There’s not an incentive to really spend time with the person. Yeah. There’s a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams that I really recommend. We did a documentary about Ira Glasser called Mighty Ira which was my video team and my protege, Nico Purino and Chris Malby and Aaron Reese, put it together and it just follows the life and times of Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU. If you could just linger on that, that’s a fascinating story.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.